July 19th, 2010

I come across this particular myth all the time. We could call it a myth. Or we could call it a limiting belief.

It’s found all over the place in personal development speak. I think I probably have it sprinkled liberally all over my own web site.

And, in some senses, this statement is true: You already have all the resources you need to achieve whatever you want to achieve.

You know how it goes: If you think you can’t, then you’re right – you can’t. If you think you can, then you can. That’s the powerfully hypnotic effect of our ‘self-talk,’ those scripts we’re constantly running somewhere inside our minds. By taking the conscious decision to choose to believe that we can do something, we can actually start to make it happen.

My job is to help people to recognise, uncover, rediscover, nurture and love into being their special abilities and inner resources for positive change.

On the other hand, that pesky statment can also act as a limiting belief: I already have all the resources I need to achieve whatever I want to achieve. (So I don’t have to do anything. I’ll just lie back and close my eyes and the therapist will do it all for me.)

This is where the ‘magic wand’ perception of hypnotherapy can be so unhelpful.

Because we have to actively grow and cultivate a mindset, an attitude, behaviors and habits that create our sense of well-being. We have to work at them every day. It requires commitment and effort.

Get to know your resources, even the nascent ones, the hidden or not-quite-ready-yet ones. Recognise the difference between the knowledge and skills that you might not have yet and the stuff you already know how to do. Fill in the gaps. With love and patience and curiosity towards yourself.

You have the capacity to learn and grow everything that you need to learn and grow. And you will need to actively cultivate it.

That’s the bit that sometimes gets missed out in the more Pollyanna, happy-clappy interpretations.

You already know what to do. The thing is, do you really want to?

Tags: hypnotherapy myths, limiting beliefs, positive psychology
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June 7th, 2010

Today I’d like to talk about an application of hypnotherapy and self-hypnosis that, as a female hypnotherapist, I feel particularly passionate about: that is, the area of hypnosis for pregnancy and childbirth.

I’m passionate about it because it seems to me that so much can be done with some very basic information and resources that can make very positive changes in the experiences of so many women and babies. And it could result in huge costs savings to the NHS.

Athough there is a lot more information now available about using hypnotherapy and self-hypnosis to prepare for the birth of your baby, many women still do not pursue this approach and one of the reasons that I think tends to put them off is the perception that hypnosis for childbirth is all a bit ‘hippy’ and ‘alternative’ – in other words, that there is enormous pressure on women choosing this approach to have a totally natural and drug-free delivery.

So I want to dispel this myth right here and now. Because any well-trained hypnotherapist will adhere to a strict code of ethics in working with women to help them to prepare for the birth of their baby in a way that supports the client’s choices, views and desires. This is all about using modern tools of hypnotherapy and self-hypnosis to enjoy the birth that you want to have.

The women I’ve worked with have used the hypnotherapy sessions and self-hypnosis audios that I give them to let go of fear, unwanted emotions, unhelpful stories and associations around birth and to access the powerful natural resources they possess to have a safe birth in a way that works for them.

The work we have done together has helped them to enjoy more control and calm over their birth experience and to make choices that feel right for them.

There is now a growing body of research to suggest that the use of simple self-hypnosis techniques can reduce length of labour and the need for medical intervention.

This is not really rocket science. It makes perfect sense that anything that helps to minimise the adrenaline response – therefore minimising muscular tension, production of other stress hormones and sensitivity to pain and discomfort – is going to be enormously helpful in childbirth. We are beginning to discover that consistent practice in self-hypnosis can enable people to minimise or interrupt the the ‘fight or flight’ or adrenaline response and increase production of ‘feel-good’ chemicals such as the ‘love hormone’ oxytocin.

Regular practice with self-hypnosis audios, use of simple ‘anchors’ to reinforce positive, progressive feeling states and develop calm and confidence and looking at the way that you talk to yourself inside your own mind are all part of this process.

Then there are other interesting applications of hypnotherapy – working in session with a trained and experienced practitioner – that can provide other sorts of powerful benefits. A couple of weeks ago I was delighted to be able to assist a first-time mother in helping her baby, who was breech position, to turn. We achieved this together through simple visualisation and breathing techniques in hypnosis – and this client felt justifiably proud that she had been able to achieve this. There is lots of anecdotal evidence of using hypnotherapy to help breech babies to turn – I’ve witnessed it quite a few times in my practice now – and I think we need more research into this fascinating application of hypnotherapy.

For me, the most important aspect of my work using hypnotherapy for childbirth  is that my client feels supported and able to make the choices she wants to make with informed advice from her other health care providers. For me, this isn’t an ‘alternative’ treatment but one that beautifully complements the work of doctors, consultants, nursing staff and midwives.

Whether you opt for a homebirth in a birthing pool or a birth in hospital – and whether these plans change over time – self-hypnosis and hypnotherapy help you to prepare and develop valuable tools that can help you at every stage.

In amongst all the many messages and pieces of advice that seem to be targeted at expectant mothers from every angle these days, hypnotherapy for childbirth is about finding and strengthening your way – by developing trust in what your body can do so wonderfully and finding what is most helpful for you personally.

Hypnotherapy for childbirth – not just for drum-banging advocates  of ‘natural childbirth’ but a powerful modern complement to the very best health care.

Tags: hypnosis for childbirth, hypnotherapy for childbirth
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May 17th, 2010

Goodness me. It seems like a long time since I did one of these ‘myth-busting’ posts.

I have been so busy planning various new projects including new work with the University of York in Writing for Personal and Professional Development, my new Hypnotherapy Training Diploma in York in 2011 with Adam Eason and a new peer support group for all hypnotherapists in the Yorkshire area.

The new peer support group is this Wednesday 19 May at 7pm at the York Novotel. Please do get in touch if you’re a professional hypnotherapist in Yorkshire and would like to come along.

So myth-busting. Well, actually, it’s not exactly myth-busting today but more a discussion about a term. This term ‘hypnotherapy/ist.’ What do we mean by it?

For example, in my own mind these days, I tend to think of hypnotherapy as a form of solution-focused, brief psychotherapy that utilises hypnosis to help people to make positive and progressive changes in their lives. When I’m working with someone, I might use an entire range of approaches that a solution-focused brief therapist would use together with hypnotic language patterns and hypnotherapy ‘techniques.’

I might use tasking and journaling and draw upon ideas from the Human Givens approach or Stephen Gilligan’s Self-Relations model of psychotherapy. I will always, without exception, teach my clients self-hypnosis – because, really, all hypnosis is self-hypnosis (according to my own research and understanding, anyway) and I believe that self-hypnosis is a very powerful tool for increased calm, confidence and the ability to manipulate our own internal states in helpful ways.

However, one of the issues which I think we face in the field dof hypnotherapy today is the public understanding of the term ‘hypnotherapist.’ For example, some people might immediately think about past life regression – although I never use this in my work – or that a hypnotherapist will help them to ‘remember something they’ve forgotten.’ Or they say ‘Don’t look into my eyes…’ as if I have some kind of power over them…

These are all concepts that are surrounded with controversy, mystery and, yes, comedy in the public awareness and need careful consideration if you want to be an effective hypnotherapist.

For me, becoming an effective therapist of any kind is about developing a style of therapy – and my style happens to incorporate hypnosis, self-hypnosis and Ericksonian approaches, along with some CBT (which has a long history of association with hypnosis) and some more broadly brief therapy approaches.

What do we mean when we talk about ‘hypnotherapy’? We know that there is nothing intrinsically therapeutic about hypnosis as a state (or non-state, depending upon your point of view) in itself.

I don’t like calling myself a ‘hypnotist’ because for me that has connotations of stage hypnotism and the idea that there is a person doing the hypnotising to someone else – whereas my personal model of hypnotherapy is a kind of self-hypnosis that two people co-create. Something like that. I don’t think someone can go into/access the feeling of hypnosis unless they agree to and want to do so. (But there will be hypnotists out there who disagree with that statement.)

There are colleagues of mine who are equally happy with both the term ‘hypnotist’ and hypnotherapist.’ There are others who want to distance themselves from the least possible whiff of ‘New Age’ jargon. There are probably as many ways of doing therapy as there are clients out there looking for it.

But it seems to me that we do need some kind of framework – especially if we are going to continue developing standards of training and CPD and incorporate research – qualitative and quantitative – into the field of hypnotherapy.

So I am really interested to hear what you think? What does the term ‘hypnotherapy’ mean to you?

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March 8th, 2010

There is something about that swinging watch, ‘look into my eyes,’ association with hypnosis, something about the idea of hypnotism and the hypnotist, that produces an expectation in many people that, in order to go into a powerful state of trance, first their eyes will need to close. (And, of course, soon after that their head will loll back and they will start drooling and dribbling and then an hour later they will open their eyes and wonder ‘Where was I?’ and have no recollection of what has occurred.)

Yes, this is still what many, many people think about when they think about hypnosis: that the hypnotist induces the state of hypnosis in them or for them and their bodies respond in a particular way, perhaps like being in a walking dream or even totally anaesthetised or unconscious.

In fact, as we have discussed before on this blog, a hypnotherapist does not and cannot put you into hypnosis. Perhaps the only thing we can say with any accuracy is that, when you are willing, a hypnotherapist can facilitate the process with you, helping you to create a certain quality of attention or awareness in which you are more receptive to suggestion and change.

In order for this to happen, you do not even have to close your eyes. You can be in trance with your eyes open, moving around, going about various aspects of your day.

As many hypnotherapists will tell you on their websites, hypnosis is a very natural state (or non-state) that we move in and out of quite naturally. One of the common examples of a natural trance state is the ‘driving trance,’ that state of relaxed and focused awareness, often a heightened kind of awareness, in which your conscious mind drifts off with all kinds of thoughts and suddenly, to your surprise, you realise that you are reaching the end of your road, approaching your own house and you think to yourself, ‘How did I get here? Who has been driving all this time?’

If you are a child of the 80′s, like me, you might remember the famous shower scene from that 80′s soap, Dallas, where Bobby Ewing drifts off in the shower, thus imagining or day-dreaming an entire series, with plot twists and side stories, that had audiences on the edge of their seats trying to figure out who shot JR. That is, until Bobby realised that he had been standing in the shower for far too long and really should get out now because he was becoming a wrinkled prune. The entire series had been imagined and experienced inside his mind. And Bobby Ewing certainly didn’t have his eyes closed. (Maybe there was a little soap involved.)

Or you may be most familiar with the particular trance state, often described as ‘hypnagogia,’ in which we drift somewhere between waking and sleeping, either at the beginning or end of the day.

Or, like me, you may enjoy being fully immersed in a certain creative activity  such as writing or painting or gardening, where you lose all track of time. This kind of temporal distortion is a strong sign of trance. I would even argue – and I regularly do – that writing, when approached in a particular way, is a kind of self-hypnosis and can be used to induce a state of trance.

And so this idea that hypnosis is something we do with our eyes closed is clearly unhelpful and misleading.

One of my favourite books on hypnosis and therapeutic trance is called ‘Trances People Live By,’ by Stephen Wolinsky, a book that, as the title suggests, describes our problems as states of negative or unhelpful trance. Wolinsky writes:

‘Reactions are trance states when they happen to us – which is more often than not. We blow up, raise our voices, slam our fists down on tables, get red-faced,  get passionate. We don’t usually experience ourselves as consciously, intentionally creating our reactions, especially when any degree of emotional valence is involved.’ (Wolinsky. 1991. p. 15).

You may have noticed, only after the event, this kind of unhelpful trance state.  For example, you might be experiencing a certain relationship trance: he says that, you say that, then he says that and, before you even know it, you’ve both had that argument again, that one, the one that goes like that. You’re firing off all kinds of post-hypnotic suggestions to each other: ‘You always do that… You’re always late… You never do that…’

According to this model, our reactions are very useful tools, giving us valuable information, once we’ve blurted them out for the hundredth time and can see them clearly and become less identified with them.

An enjoyable in-the-present-moment experience can turn into a particular kind of trance state when we start spinning fantasies or stories – either positive and pleasurable or anxiety-invoking – into the future.

I love the way Wolinsky describes the trance phenomena (age regression, pseudo-orientation in time, positive or negative hallucination and so on) that we can create in this way: ‘Trance phenomena “shrink-wrap” our focus of attention, leaving a very consricted perspective with which we usually strongly identify’ (p.15).

One of the most wonderful and fascinating hypnotherapy sessions I ever experienced was when I was working with a very young client, aged seven, who had been refusing to go to bed at night, refusing to go to school in the mornings, getting very distressed, crying and screaming and shouting and generally creating all kinds of problems for herself and her parents. Her parents were worried that she was very anxious about something and asked me if I could help.

Sure enough, the girl arrived in a temper. She was really very angry with her mum and she proceeded to kick her legs and stamp her feet and sat on the floor in the corner of my consultancy room, with her back to us and her hands over her ears.

She shouted repeatedly, ‘I don’t need your help. I can do it myself.’

As her mum told the story of the problem, I noticed that the little girl’s body language became more marked whenever her baby brother was mentioned and so I continued to question her mum about the little brother until we were talking about him almost exclusively.

Sure enough, my client soon stopped shouting, turned around, tried to climb on her mum’s lap and started interjecting herself into the story. After some time, I asked her if she would like to talk about the feelings that she was having in the morning before school and she repeated, more quietly, that she didn’t need my help. She could ‘do it herself.’

I replied that I could see how grown-up and clever she was and that I was absolutely certain that she could do it herself extremely well.  I then went through an elaborate rigmarole of taking out my notebook, asking her questions -  her name, age, the school she attended, her favourite activities – and I made a great show of writing them all down in my book. Right at the end of this I said ‘So could you tell me exactly, just so that I can write it in my book here, when you will have this problem sorted; exactly when you will be able to do it all yourself?’

Quick as a flash, she answered, ‘By tomorrow.’

I wrote that down too, gave her mum a self-hypnosis audio programme to help the client to enjoy deep, refreshing sleep – when, and only when, she would like to use it – we finished the session and arranged that I would call her mum to check in with her the following day. And how wonderful it was to discover that my client had got up, got dressed, had her breakfast and gone happily off to school as if without a care in the world. And this new behavior continued for the next few days, weeks, months. She certainly did do it all her self.

Only the most indirect and conversational hypnosis was used in the session. There was certainly no formal kind of eyes-closed trance.

I often think about that session and just how well it illustrates that a problem itself can be a kind of negative trance-state in which we unconsciously do the things we do, creating all kinds of bad feelings for ourselves. As a therapist, I believe that, when I can meet my client in his or her particular trance, I can then help him or her to shift it and transform it.

If we think about hypnotic trance as a quality of non-conscious attention – sometimes helpful and sometimes not so helpful – that we can naturally find ourselves in at all kinds of times, then this subtly changes our understanding of our role as practitioners and clients of hypnotherapy.

By becoming more consciously aware of that trance thing you’re doing – with your eyes wide open – you can begin to make changes to it, to manipulate it and move it forward.

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February 22nd, 2010

Every Monday, I address a common myth around hypnosis and hypnotherapy…

I feel I need to warn you. This myth is a Big Myth. In fact, this myth is so pervasive in the world of therapy, hypnotherapy and hypnosis that perhaps it should carry a health warning.

I mean that seriously.

The problem, as I have come to understand it, is that there are many therapists out there – working in many different disciplines – who will tell you that it is necessary to understand why you feel the way you do in order to feel better. Let’s call this myth the Big Myth of Why.

But first, let me ask you something. Are there things going on for you right now that you understand perfectly well – and perhaps you may even have had a couple of years of soul-searching and/or therapy to understand where those feelings come from and you have a very good intellectual understanding of these problems – and yet you still seem to be experiencing them, all the same?

I meet people every day who have an incredibly finely honed and articulate understanding of the history of their problems. They have spent years thinking about it and analysing it. They can understand why that something is happening and yet the why doesn’t necessarily help them to change the behaviours, habits, emotions and responses that they want to let go of. The why doesn’t necessarily change anything.

My feeling is that ‘why ‘doesn’t serve us particularly well when we want to make changes in our lives.

And, indeed, I have met people who are on a search for why. They are on a big mission of why. They are making why their life’s work. Their internal script goes, ‘If I can just understand why this is happening, I will feel better…’ and they have been trying to understand why for the last two or twelve or twenty years. And this trying to understand why has become a painful and tortuous journey in which they find themselves feeling worse than when they started. Maybe they are now obsessed with the idea of wanting to know why or caught up in endless rumination and questioning that is creating a lot of anxiety and feelings of somehow not being good enough.

And this search for why brings them to the consulting room of a hypnotherapist. Because the Big Myth of Why says that a hypnotherapist can go inside your mind and discover why. A hypnotherapist can regress you to the exact time and place in your life where the problem started – and then you will know and then you will feel better. Right?

Well, erm, actually, not necessarily. In fact, probably not.

It’s a seductive notion, this concept of ‘deep underlying causes’ for our problems and issues. If we could neatly pin it down to one formative event – for example, the day our primary teacher told us off in front of the class for getting a word wrong and then we suddenly became unable to read aloud in front of others -  that might certainly be very convenient. But is this a little over-reductive?

Problem One: Now, I am not saying that some issues that people experience do not carry with them the resonances and echoes of prevous experiences. Of course, they can do. Over the years, we can form beliefs about ourselves as the result of our experiences, the things we hear around us,  our interactions with significant others, for example.

However, fears, problems, phobias and habits tend to fade away over time unless we are actively keeping them fuelled with our own thoughts and worries and beliefs and the way that we talk to ourselves inside our minds.

So our primary school teacher may have introduced us to the notion of fear – but that is only part of the story.We have somehow kept the fear going. In order to let go of the fear, we need to understand how we are still doing it to ourselves twenty-five years later, so that we can start to change things.

Problem Two: Even if a hypnotherapist can help us to indentify the so-called ‘root cause’ of a particular issue, this doesn’t mean that it actually happened  or happened in the way that we experience it now in hypnosis.

We still do not sufficiently understand the way that memory works, for example, but it is thought that, in order to experience a memory, our brains need to go back and reimagine or recreate that memory in order for us to experience it again. And we may not recreate it in exactly the way that it actually happened.

Have you ever experienced a situation that really didn’t bother you until you began to go over and over it in your head and it gradually assumed all the proportions and details and colours of a horror story? That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.

In a similar way, dreams and fantasies can be re-imaginings and re-workings of what we have experienced in the day. And although our dreams can feel very ‘real’ to us when they are happening, we wouldn’t dream of supposing that they are representations of truth.

We can’t be sure that how people experience things in hypnosis is how things actually happened either. There may be a feeling-tone, a sensory theme of the hypnotic experience that carries emotions and  memories and associations from way back. But things can get a little blurry and what actully happened and how we re-experience it can get a little mixed-up.

But what really concerns me about the Big Myth that goes, ‘there must be an underlying cause somewhere in a person’s past for the problems and challenges that s/he might be facing in the present,’ is that this assumption can result in long (and often expensive) periods of fruitless searching, over-thinking, rumination and anxiety.

If you’re asking yourself why something is happening for you, a well-trained hypnotherapist can help you to understand how you are doing that thing in the present and what you can do differently to change it as well as any possible emotions, associations and habits you’ve been carrying from the past.

So, I think this is good news. Because if it’s possible that there is no why,  no single pin-downable ’cause’ for what you are feeling, then you may simply have been looking in the wrong direction. The search for why may have been holding you back from becoming more consciously aware of how you can do the problem differently.

Tags: hypnosis, Hypnotherapy and self-hypnosis, regression, underying cause
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February 15th, 2010

Every Monday, I’m going to be addressing a common myth around hypnosis and hypnotherapy…

This week, let’s look at the one that goes: ‘Hypnosis is weird/ scary/ mystical/ mind-control/ utter hippy nonsense/ what that bloke off the telly does/ brain-washing/ something you do to me to fix my head  *

* or a combination of the above.

Firstly, I want to let you into a secret. Noone knows exactly what hypnosis is. Nope. Hypnotherapists don’t know what hypnosis actually is, and neither do researchers looking at people’s brains whilst in this apparent state of hypnosis with MRI scans and other neuroimaging techniques.

In MRI scans, we can see parts of the brain either ‘light up’ or get ‘turned off’ when people are apparently in hypnosis. Here is an example of the kind of research into hypnosis that neuroimaging is making possible, carried out by Amir Raz, who wanted to look at how hypnotic suggestions might affect the regulation of pain in the brain. This particular research gives us fascinating data about how hypnotic suggestions ‘turn off’ the area of the brain known as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which would normally get activated when performing certain tasks. It has many interesting possibilities for further research and application.

But it still doesn’t really tell us what hypnosis actually is.

The question of whether hypnosis is an actual state of attention (state theory) or a set of beliefs, attitudes and expectations (non-state theory) is hotly contested in the field of hypnotherapy and hypnosis. In fact, you will find people arguing about it all over the internet.

The state theory maintains that hypnosis is an actual change in the quality of our attention and awareness, a kind of experiential shift or hypnotic ‘trance’ state that is often described by people in terms of changes in temporal and spatial awareness (‘My body feels so heavy,’ ‘My hands feel so huge’ or ‘Has that really been half an hour? It felt like ten minutes’).

The non-state theory of hypnosis claims that there is no such thing as this altered state of awareness or hypnotic ‘trance’ and that the effects of hypnosis can be explained by the motivation, cognitive set and expectation of the person being hypnotised and the way that he or she is prepared to work towards a therapeutic goal.

You will notice that, so far, there has been no mention in either of these theories of a sleep-like or unconscious state, nor of vaudevillian stunts. Contrary to popular misconception – and I do still meet people who think of hypnosis in this way – hypnosis is not like being asleep or unconscious. It is not something that a hypnotist or therapist does to you.

In hypnotherapy, the therapist does not go inside your mind and flick levers and switches or make things disappear or convince you that something you previously thought true is now suddenly untrue. (I don’t know about you but I would personally find that rather unnerving. I wouldn’t go anywhere near a hypnotherapist if I believed that s/he could do that to me!)

We know that hypnosis is something that you actively need to co-create with the therapist you choose to work with. The therapist guides you through the process of going into hypnosis (state theory) or you yourself create the mindset and beliefs within which the changes can happen (non-state theory) because you want to make the changes you want to make. Or a combination of these two.

To illustrate this more clearly, we know that if a person sits in the chair with their arms crossed and says, ‘Humph. Well you’re not going to put me under. You’re not going to hypnotise me, matey,’ well, then they are right. They will not be experiencing anything very soon except their own desire not to go into hypnosis. And maybe their own fear, which may be what is preventing them from making the changes in the first place.

So if we assume that most people seeking the help of a hypnotherapist actually want to make some changes in their lives, is hypnosis a state that therapists guide them into or a description of their set of beliefs and expectations that will make it possible for the therapist to work with them?

Personally, I think it is a combination of these two.

Many people who come to work with me are worried that they won’t be able to ‘do it right’ or relax sufficiently (see last Monday’ Myth-Busting) or go into hypnosis but, despite these fears and apprehensions, they learn exactly how to use the power of their minds and the power of self-hypnosis in helpful ways.

Whether you think that hypnosis is a weird (or mystical or in some way spiritual) state or non-state really depends upon your own set of beliefs around turning your attention inside yourself in a focused way. Some people think this is a very ordinary thing to do. For others, it is actually something quite special.

What I do know and continue to notice all the time in my own practice – both as a hypnotherapist and as someone who regularly uses self-hypnosis – is that it’s so easy to be carried away by the busy-ness of our everyday lives so that making time to direct our attention inwards in a focused way and really notice what we are feeling and thinking and how, in a sense, we are doing or creating or imagining our lives can feel strange, weird, pleasant, a relief or even slightly scary at first. It may be something we haven’t done for a long time.

When we begin to learn and understand how to do our lives and thoughts and internal experience in more helpful and progressive ways, I do personally think that is a very powerful experience. Learning to relax deeply or notice our thoughts or the way that our body feels in the midst of our busy-ness can be a kind of special or transformative experience.

There are some who would say that all our experiences are kinds of ‘trance state,’ either positive, neutral or negative, until we become consciously aware that we are doing them. So we find ourselves going into the trance of a particular relationship (he says that, she says that, you say that) or the trance of work (everything is so hard and it will never get any better) or the one about money (I need more and never seem to have enough and if only I had more my life would be so much better), for example.

Hypnosis, then, in this regard, is a kind of waking up from the trance of our everyday lives.

Tags: hypnosis, Hypnotherapy and self-hypnosis, hypnotic suggestibility, non-state theory, state theory, suggestion, trance
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February 8th, 2010

Every Monday, I’m going to be addressing a common myth around hypnosis and hypnotherapy…

Sometimes, when I’m working with new clients to gather information for the work we’re going to begin together, they will say something like: ‘I am worried that you won’t be able to hypnotise me because I just can’t relax.’

In other words, hypnosis and relaxation are often thought of as more or less the same thing. Well, whilst it’s true that many people experience hypnosis and self-hypnosis as a deeply calming, centring or grounding experience in which their mind and body begin to feel more relaxed, we do not need to actually feel relaxed in order to go into hypnosis.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: hypnosis, Hypnotherapy and self-hypnosis, relxation
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